Gentle reader,
We are so grateful to everyone who gets this streaming webinar channel newsletter, but especially to our paid subscribers. Their generous support ($50/month or $100/year) makes it possible for us to advocate to save the Bronson corner court bungalows, Marilyn Monroe’s house, Sunshine the last Bunker Hill palm tree and other special landmarks at immediate risk of being lost. We couldn’t do it without them!
Email updates on this channel are infrequent since we aren’t producing new webinars, but we post regularly on our main newsletter, where you’ll learn about upcoming Esotouric tours like the new Hollywood Noir (11/29), inspired when NoirCon announced it would honor us in October with an award for keeping Los Angeles noir alive through guided tours and public corruption court reporting.
Today’s video post is our recent interview on LAist’s Morning Edition, talking about the remarkable discovery of a previously unknown single family home designed by master architect Arthur B. Benton.
What a happy story, right? Wrong.
Beaulyland (1912) at 284 South Coronado in the Westlake District is owned by an investment group that seeks to heavily remodel it into small apartments, even as their lender prepares to send the property into foreclosure and no demolition permit has yet been granted.
But because this is “a housing project,” under State law the city’s Office of Historic Resources will not even accept a landmark nomination for consideration. If you scroll down to “Updates” on our original newsletter about the discovery, you can read what Emma Howard from Council District 13 had to say about it.
So this message goes out to all our wealthy readers who love great Southern California architecture and are looking for a special project: can’t someone please make the current owner or the lender of Beaulyland an offer they can’t refuse, in order to preserve and protect and restore it?
Beaulyland could absolutely be converted into multi-family housing, as happened with many of the great Bunker Hill and Angeleno Heights mansions. But any such a conversion should be done sensitively, with an aim to retain the historic features, and not by demolishing the iconic poured concrete garage that bears the very name of this beautiful house.
Are you or someone you forward this newsletter going to be Beaulyland’s guardian angel?
Downtown Los Angeles is a true time machine, and as much as we seen, we never say we’ve seen it all. Just discovered: a stunning pair of Pre-Columbian figures ushering guests beneath Broadway at the Million Dollar Theatre. Mayan Revival was in fashion in the 1920s, and the iconography was revived in the 1960s and 1970s around the Chicano mural scene, but the Million Dollar was already a center for Mexican film and performing arts in the 1950s, so it’s hard to know when these might have been painted. Hope someone remembers them!
We used to give bus tours, and loved it, but now that our Los Angeles history excursions are on foot we discover such amazing artifacts! Like this c. 1895 ornamental iron fence, imported from the east, which you’ll see on Saturday’s Angelino Heights tour.
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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Our work—leading tours and historic preservation and cultural landmark advocacy—is about building a bridge between Los Angeles’ past and its future, and not allowing the corrupt, greedy, inept and misguided players who hold present power to destroy the city’s soul and body. If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person tours and a souvenir shop you can browse in. We’ve also got recommended reading bookshelves on Amazon and the Bookshop indie bookstore site. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING WALKING TOURS
• Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (9/27) • Charles Bukowski’s Westlake (10/4) • Know Your Downtown LA: Bradbury Building, Basements, Dutch Chocolate Shop (10/11) • The Run: Gay Downtown History (10/18) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (11/1) • Highland Park Arroyo Time Travel Trip (11/8) • Richard’s Birthday: Alvarado Terrace & South Bonnie Brae Tract (11/15) • The Real Black Dahlia (11/22) • Hollywood Noir (11/29) • Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (12/6) • Westlake Park Time Travel Trip (12/13) • Miracle Mile Marvels & Madness (Sunday, 12/21) • Human Sacrifice: The Black Dahlia, Elisa Lam, Heidi Planck & Skid Row Slasher Cases (12/27)
